Philosophy Faculty Publications

In his influential article on the ethics of eating animals, Alastair Norcross argues that consumers of factory raised meat and puppy torturers are equally condemnable because both knowingly cause serious harm to sentient creatures just for trivial pleasures. Against this claim, I argue that those who buy and consume factory raised meat, even those who do so knowing that they cause harm, have a partial excuse for their wrongdoings. Meat eaters act under social duress, which causes volitional impairment, and they often act from deeply ingrained habits, which causes epistemic impairment. But puppy torturers act against cultural norms and habits ...

Philosophy Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Logical pluralism is the view that there are distinct, but equally good logics. Recent years have witnessed a sharp upswing of interest in this view, resulting in an impressive literature. We only expect this trend to continue in the future. More than one commentator has, however, expressed exasperation at the view: what can it mean to be a pluralist about logic of all things? [see, e.g., Eklund (2017); Goddu (2002); Keefe (2014)]. In this introduction, we aim to set out the basic pluralist position, identify some issues over which pluralists disagree amongst themselves, and highlight the topics ...

Philosophy Faculty Publications

It is common for conservationists to refer to non-native species that have undesirable impacts on humans as “invasive”. We argue that the classification of any species as “invasive” constitutes wrongful discrimination. Moreover, we argue that its being wrong to categorize a species as invasive is perfectly compatible with it being morally permissible to kill animals—assuming that conservationists “kill equally”. It simply is not compatible with the double standard that conservationists tend to employ in their decisions about who lives and who dies.

The sheer amount of material packed into the nearly 1,000 pages of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, volume 3, is breath-taking. In this volume the editors, Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, Maree de Angury, and Ellen Skerrett include a generous selection of Addams’s correspondence and writings during the first decade of Hull House’s existence, supplemented by extensive endnotes and commentary. This continues the pattern the ...

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Mainstream analytic philosophy has long focused on a rationalistic conception of persons as the beings that matter morally. This has led to a heavy concentration on respect as a, if not the, core moral attitude. This paper aims to complicate the picture by arguing that personhood is more complex than this, because the identities in virtue of which persons matter are more complex. Persons matter not only as (abstract) persons, but as specific individuals and members of groups. As a result, they should be recognized in corresponding ways that go beyond respect, including love and esteem. Doing so expands our ...

Social Esteem As Moral Recognition, Erica Stonestreet

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Some strands of feminist and social philosophy suggest that the basis for personhood is having an identity—where identity is not defined entirely in individualistic terms of reason and autonomy and is in fact quite relational. When personhood is conceived in these terms, morality becomes a matter of recognizing persons for who they are, which includes recognizing them as members of social groups. In this paper I explore the notion of esteem as a species of recognition for these layers of identity, claiming that esteem deserves to stand on equal footing with respect as a moral attitude.

A Physcialist Theory Of Managing Impediments To Democracy And Peace Building In The Balkans, Rory Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The post-conflict societies of Bosnia and Kosovo continue to be plagued by the deleterious effects of ethno-nationalism and ethnic enclaves. Unfortunately, this mix impedes both democracy and peace building within these Balkan countries. One way to promote such building is for these enclaves to collapse, thereby allowing multiethnic societies to develop. This essay proposes that enclaves be dealt with physically by ridding them of those evocative objects that help to create and maintain enclaves. By getting physical in this way, however, we find ourselves in a dilemma, caught on the horns of legality and expediency. Yet there is a promising ...

The Poststructuralist Broom Of Wallace’S System: A Conversation Between Wittgenstein And Derrida, Vernon W. Cisney

Philosophy Faculty Publications

David Foster Wallace famously characterized his first novel, The Broom of the System, as ‘a conversation between [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and [Jacques] Derrida.’ This comes as little surprise, given the ubiquity of the question of language in the works of these two thinkers, and given the novel’s constant reflections on the relation between language and world. Broom’s protagonist, LenoreBeadsmen – in search of her eponymous great-grandmother – is preoccupied with the dread that ‘all that really exists of [her] life is what can be said about it,’ that is to say, that reality is entirelycoextensive with language. If, as ...

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This book review attempts to interpret the meaning and value of Gary Peters’ book in a way that is true to the kind of book, an experimental improvisation, that it purports to be. As such, it grapples with the difficulties of evaluating the merits of a philosophical discussion within a book that claims not to be philosophy and case studies in performance that beg the question of whether they accurately exemplify the (non-)philosophy they are meant to support. Despite these difficulties, this review ends with the conclusion that this book does, in fact, convey something essential about the nature ...

Exit, Voice, And Public Reason, Kevin Vallier

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Public reason liberals appeal to public deliberation to ensure that a legal order can be publicly justified to its citizens. I argue that this voice mechanism should be supplemented by exit mechanisms. By allowing citizens to exit legal orders they believe cannot be publicly justified, citizens can pressure states to change their laws. This exit pressure is sometimes more effective than deliberation. I explore federalism as an exit mechanism that can help public deliberation establish a publicly justified polity.

Philosophy Faculty Publications

While humanity is altering planet Earth at unprecedented magnitude and speed, representation of the cultural driving factors and their dynamics in models of the Earth system is limited. In this review and perspectives paper, we argue that more or less distinct environmental value sets can be assigned to religion – a deeply embedded feature of human cultures, here defined as collectively shared belief in something sacred. This assertion renders religious theories, practices and actors suitable for studying cultural facets of anthropogenic Earth system change, especially regarding deeper, non-materialistic motivations that ask about humans' self-understanding in the Anthropocene epoch. We sketch a ...

Can The Philanthropic Imperative Enhance International Health Care?, Paul Carrick

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Elsewhere I have argued that, historically, the public and private funding of health care has been fueled primarily by four mixed motives, namely, the redemptive, the utilitarian, the prudential, and the charitable motives. In this paper, I further explore what I call the unifying moral force of the philanthropic imperative. The philanthropic imperative interfaces these four motives by potentially appealing to the consciences of wealthier Northern countries to provide medical resources to the sick and hurting in the typically poorer South. This, as a matter of our collective duty to others consistent with the teachings of Immanuel Kant, Thich Nhat ...

A New Vision Of Liberal Education: The Good Of The Unexamined Life, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Alistair Miller’s book, A New Vision of Liberal Education, is a dilation of his doctoral thesis, but it is enormously ambitious in aim: “My specific aim in this book is to explore whether aspects of the two traditions [of Enlightenment and Aristotelian ethics] might be synthesised in the concrete form of a liberal-humanist education” (NVLE, 11). Indeed, the arc of Miller’s argument ranges from these contrasting traditions of moral philosophy, through alternate versions of liberal education, to a proposal for curricular content. The book is well researched and proceeds dialectically, as Miller sifts through scholarship on liberal education ...

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Unlike other scholars who interpret William James’s “The Moral Equivalent of War” in light of the author’s other writings, I read the essay as James’s contribution to conversations being held within the pre-World War One international peace movement. The essay shares the vocabulary, images, and patterns of reasoning widely employed by others in the movement. James’s analysis of violence described a standard frame of mind at that time. Like many of his contemporaries, he assumed that war had contributed to social cohesion and strenuousness in the past, but that this was no longer the case. Like ...

Classical Logic, Stewart Shapiro, Teresa Kouri Kissel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

[From introductory section]

Typically, a logic consists of a formal or informal language together with a deductive system and/or a model-theoretic semantics. The language has components that correspond to a part of a natural language like English or Greek. The deductive system is to capture, codify, or simply record arguments that are valid for the given language, and the semantics is to capture, codify, or record the meanings, or truth-conditions for at least part of the language.

The following sections provide the basics of a typical logic, sometimes called “classical elementary logic” or “classical first-order logic”....

Diversified Philosophy, Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this essay, Aili Bresnahan notes that institutions and many others are working to diversify the field of philosophy, in terms of the persons who count as philosophers, what counts as a legitimate philosophical methodology, and which phenomena and entities it handles. She writes that this is a positive development that will enrich and enliven the field so that, ultimately, philosophy survives.

Against The Intentional Definition Of Argument, G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Intentional definitions of argument, i.e. the conclusion being intended to follow from the premises, abound. Yet, there are numerous problem cases in which we appear to have arguments, but no intention. One way to try to avoid these problem cases is to appeal to acts, in which case one has to give up on the repeatability of arguments. One can keep repeatability and intentions if one resorts to act types, but then it appears that the problem cases re-emerge.

From Justice To Fairness: Does Kant's Doctrine Of Right Imply A Theory Of Distributive Justice?, Michael Nance, Jeppe Von Platz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The fact that Kant does not articulate a theory of distributive justice has not kept political philosophers from citing Kant as inspiration and support for whatever theory of distributive justice they favor - including those who argue that the notion of distributive justice is itself mistaken. This widespread reliance on Kant invites the question, "Does the Doctrine of Right imply a theory of distributive justice?"

To address this question, we discuss Paul Guyer's argument that Kant's Doctrine of Right implies, roughly, the principles of distributive justice as found in Rawls's justice as fairness. Guyer's argument is that ...

Review Of Tsarnia Doyle, Nietzsche's Metaphysics Of The Will To Power: The Possibility Of Value, Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

Tsarina Doyle's new book is required reading for those interested in Nietzsche's metaphysics, ethics, and metaethics. Doyle argues that for Nietzsche nihilism arises upon the recognition that our values are not objectively valid because they are not instantiated by a mind-independent world. Nietzsche responds to the threat of nihilism, according to Doyle, by developing will to power as a metaphysical view of reality. On this view, the world is constituted by mind-independent causal powers. For Doyle, Nietzsche believes values are metaphysically continuous with will to power because they are causal-dispositional properties of human drives. Will to ...

Technology And Discrimination, D. E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This chapter develops a full theory of discriminatory technologies grounded in Heideggerian, Latourian, and Ihdean theoretical structures and demonstrates its applicability to a wide and widening range of forms of normativity, exclusion, and discrimination, taking place across intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, trans/cisgender identity, disability, and religious identity. Technologies, technical systems, and artifacts considered are wide-ranging, and include algorithms, adhesive bandages, human resource management policies, calendars, VR systems, carpentry, strollers, photographic film formulation and printing, video game character classes, and stairs.

Nietzsche And The Death Of God, Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nietzsche is perhaps most famous for making the striking claim that God is dead. He writes, "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" (GS 125).

What does this mean? Straightforwardly, it seems nonsensical. God is supposed to be eternal, and thus cannot die. Nietzsche’s claim, however, is that "God" is a fiction created by human beings. Thus, God "dies" when there is no good reason to believe that God exists.

This essay will help us understand this claim, his arguments for it, and its potential implications for contemporary religious and ethical thought.

Truths, Facts, And Liars, Peter Marton

Philosophy Faculty Publications

A Moderate Anti-realist (MAR) approach to truth and meaning, built around the concept of knowability, will be introduced and argued for in this essay. Our starting point will be the two fundamental anti-realists principles that claim that neither truth nor meaning can outstrip knowability and our focus will be on the challenge of adequately formalizing these principles and incorporating them into a formal theory. Accordingly, the author will introduce a MAR truth operator that is built on a distinction between being true and being factual. He will show then that this approach partitions propositions into eight classes, on the basis ...

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As many college students are at a time of tremendous personal and academic growth, introductory philosophy courses have the potential to equip students with practical critical reasoning skills. Despite this, many introductory courses in this domain emphasize students’ learning about pre-existing dialectics in the abstract, rather than over self-reflection and development of personal philosophical perspectives. In doing so, we may be failing to support the needs of pre-professional students looking to prepare themselves for their careers ahead. In this practitioner paper, we report our efforts as a practicing philosophy instructor (Bursten) and a learning scientist (Finkelstein) to iterate on the ...

Review Of The Slow Professor: Challenging The Culture Of Speed In The Academy, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

I entered the academy having inherited a particular view of higher education from my mentors. They informed me about what I would face if I were lucky enough to land a teaching position. Not surprisingly, what they shared with me was an accurate foretelling of what I have experienced, including the exhausting Retention, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT) process, with its focus on research, teaching, and service – and ranked in that order!

It was after a quarter century of being a professor that I was fortunate enough to stumble upon The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy ...

A Physcialist Theory Of Managing Impediments To Democracy And Peace Building In The Balkans, Rory Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The post-conflict societies of Bosnia and Kosovo continue to be plagued by the deleterious effects of ethno-nationalism and ethnic enclaves. Unfortunately, this mix impedes both democracy and peace building within these Balkan countries. One way to promote such building is for these enclaves to collapse, thereby allowing multiethnic societies to develop. This essay proposes that enclaves be dealt with physically by ridding them of those evocative objects that help to create and maintain enclaves. By getting physical in this way, how¬ever, we find ourselves in a dilemma, caught on the horns of legality and expediency. Yet there is a ...

Review: 'Body Aesthetics', Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This is a book review of Sherri Irvin's edited book Body Aesthetics, a collection of 16 essays exploring a wide range of perspectives on the human body and how it is embodied, lived, viewed, perceived, and constructed by ourselves and by others in both positive and harmful ways. The book’s contributors include philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and artists, as well as scholars who focus on law, culture, and Africana, race, gender, sexuality, and disability studies.

American Populism Shouldn’T Have To Embrace Ignorance, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Public ignorance is an inherent threat to democracy. It breeds superstition, prejudice, and error; and it prevents both a clear-eyed understanding of the world and the formulation of wise policies to adapt to that world.

Plato believed it was more than a threat: He thought it characterized democracies, and would lead them inevitably into anarchy and ultimately tyranny. But the liberal democracies of the modern era, grudgingly extending suffrage, have extended public education in parallel, in the hope of cultivating an informed citizenry. Yet today, given the persistence and severity of public ignorance, the ideal of an enlightened electorate seems ...

The Revelation Of God, East And West: Contrasting Special Revelation In Western Modernity With The Ancient Christian East, Nathan A. Jacobs

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The questions of whether God reveals himself; if so, how we can know a purported revelation is authentic; and how such revelations relate to the insights of reason are discussed by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, G. W. Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant, to name a few. Yet, what these philosophers say with such consistency about revelation stands in stark contrast with the claims of the Christian East, which are equally consistent from the second century through the fourteenth century. In this essay, I will compare the modern discussion of special revelation from Thomas Hobbes through Johann Fichte with the ...

Democratic Rights And The Choice Of Economic Systems, Jeppe Von Platz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Holt argues that Rawls’s first principle of justice requires democratic control of the economy and that property owning democracy fails to satisfy this requirement; only liberal socialism is fully democratic. However, the notion of democratic control is ambiguous,and Holt has to choose between the weaker notion of democratic control that Rawls is committed to and the stronger notion that property owning democracy fails to satisfy. It may be that there is a tension between capitalism and democracy, so that only liberal socialism can be fully democratic, but if so, we should reject, rather than argue from, the theory ...